Exemplary embodiments generally relate to communications and to television and, more particularly, to receivers, to transmitters, and to remote controls.
Remote controls can be improved. Remote controls are ubiquitous and used to remotely control almost every type of electronic device. A so-called automatically-configurable or “universal” remote control has been proposed to remotely control multiple electronic devices, thus eliminating a separate remote for each device. A problem with these universal remote controls, however, is a polling mechanism to identify controllable electronic devices. When a remote control requests self-identification from electronic devices, responses from those controllable electronic devices may collide at the remote control. Most remote controls can only receive and process one response at a time. When two or more responses are nearly simultaneously received, the remote control may only process one of those responses. The other response may be ignored.